“It demands great qualities of mind and heart to relish sincerity when it hurts us, or to employ it without causing offence. Few people have enough character to endure the truth, and to speak it.”
“The extremes of good and evil are beyond the power of ordinary minds to feel.”
“The thought of death betrays us, for it makes us forget to live.”
“To achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die”
“A man who possesses keen intelligence, is little moved to wonder. And the same is true of him who lacks it. Wonder marks the limit of our knowledge and is often evidence of the imperfection of our minds, rather than of the perfection of exterior objects.”
“Great men, by teaching weak minds to think, have put them in the way of error.”
“When an idea is not robust enough to stand expression in simple terms, it is a sign that it should be rejected.”
“The main fault, in a sense, of all books, is that they are too long.”
“The dull cold days of autumn are like the approach of old age; everything in nature presents a picture of human life, because human life is itself a picture of the whole world, and the whole universe is governed by the same laws.”
“The greatest mental faculty is capacity for pleasure.”
“The art of pleasing is the art of deceiving,”
“Our actions are neither so good nor so bad as our impulses.”
“The weak like to be dependent, in order to obtain protection. Those who fear man, like law.”
“We achieve few great things by deliberation.”
“He who can endure all can dare all.”
“Reason misleads us more often than nature.”